How do you make a spaceman? You start the same way that you start to make a chess master, a ballet dancer, a trapeze performer, or any other difficult and complex task demanding highly trained and concentrated skills, physical or mental; you start when the future professionals are too young to know whether that is what they want out of life, or not.

United Nations Expeditionary Planetary Survey—UNEPS—starts every year with one hundred five-year-olds, discovered, in early testing, to be both mentally and physically superior.

Twelve years later the best graduates of the Academy are given a Ship and sent out to find habitable planets for humans to live on. But what happens to a small crew of teenagers once the Ship leaves Earth?

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Marion Zimmer Bradley is probably best known for her Darkover novels and her best-selling Arthurian novel THE MISTS OF AVALON. In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine, which she started in 1988, and an annual anthology, SWORD AND SORCERESS. For more information, see her website: www.mzbworks.com.

Top customer reviews

I loved the whole premise of this story - the idea of young people being raised in schools that trained them for heading into the deep reaches of space and then thrown out there with no further supervision or help. I think the author did a excellent job of being realistic on what the initial results would be, but it was as if she didn't know where to go for an ending and just said 'oh well, maybe they will survive and maybe they won't - I have no more idea's let's just leave it there.' It is probably just be but if I receive this type of ending I am really looking for a sequel.

Psychological space travel sci-fi. A small group of teenagers are specially trained and vetted to be a seedling of humanity set to explore and found a colony somewhere in the infinite depths of unknown space. This short novel deals mostly with the psychological group dynamics of children forced preternaturally into adult positions of privileged responsibility. They all play musical instruments as a way of diffusing dissent and the subtle changes in social stigma as they begin a decades long journey without a clear end in sight. The book feels claustrophobic and every little phrase or nuance is weighted with portent. The plot is non-existent, it's just the graduating class boarding a ship and taking off, feeling like the book is only half-written; that there should be a second half that's missing or a follow-up 2nd volume. It falls into the psychological femme-centric style of sci-fi pioneered in the late 60s early 70s by Ursula K LeGuin, CJ Cherryh and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Story:In the future the united space program selects talented young children to become future space explorers. These children go through years of training and in their 18th year, 4-10 of the children in the class (the best of the best)are chosen to crew a survey ship that goes out among the stars to find habitable planets. This is story of Survey Ship 103. This crew of 6 must survive themselves, the dangers of space travel, and a faulty star ship in order to complete their mission and help humanity spread to the stars.----Well the first thing I'll say about this book is that it is missing some of the pieces or it was meant to be part of a series. It is well written but most of what happens in the book seems to set the stage for a climax later.... that never happens. This story seems to be more of a "situational" story about what would happen if you took a bunch of super educated 18 yr olds, who have been sheltered from the world since they were selected at a very young age (usually 5 or 6), and turned them lose in a space ship and said find me a planet or don't bother coming back. The majority of the book deals with the crew "growing up" as they try to deal with not having any supervison for the first time in their lives. That is the part that makes the book interesting. If your looking for a space disater novel this is not it (try Voyage of the Star Wolf, Midshipmans hope, or The Helmsman Novels), if on the other hand your looking for a situationl novel that deals with people trying to understand themselves in a new world this novel might work for you.m.a.c

This is one of Marion Zimmer Bradley's most obscure books, I managed to borrow a copy and read it. I thought it was excellent book. This is not really a science fiction book, it's more about the relationships between characters and their development as people. It starts out in the future in a time when Earth (Terra) is even more overpopulated and so every year they pick six of the brightest students from a class of 40, who are the best and have trained for many years, to go on a survey ship to find a new planet. We have six distinct people: easygoing Teague, free spirited Moira, the roboticaly perfect Ching, sensitive Peak, the quick Fontana and the spiritual Ravi. This book is how these people survive together in a confined space and working together in spite of their differences. In a way this book is a prequel to Darkover Landfall because they appear to take place in the same universe but Darkover is still very far into the future.

In all a good read especially if you like the way Marion can turn science fiction into a rich story where the focus is on people, not the fact that it is in the future.

Sometime in the future, the human race realizes how much the population is outgrowing the planet and decides to train people to go explore the galaxy to look for other inhabitable planets. The trainees are chosen for their intelligence at a very young age, then spend their entire childhood learning a skill such as medicine, engineering, physics, etc. When they reach adulthood, the best six of them are sent off to other star systems to spend the rest of their lives searching for a place that may be hospitable to humans. This is the story of one such group.The premise is good, but I think this story had more potential than it lived up to. Too many details seemed unbelievable and the characters remained undeveloped. Better written novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley include The Mists of Avalon and The House Between the Worlds.

Excellent character study of three gals and three guys (covering the gamut of sexual orientation) locked aboard space ship headed for nowhere. Death is certain--but when? The head game going on was why any of the six were picked from a class of forty. Group psychology and future sociology study of humans cut off from mankind. Only the outer space setting qualifies story to be labeled sci-fi. Good read.

The book was okay but the pictures were not that great. I read it when I was 12 and it seems to have alot of bad things in it for young adults. There is too much phornography. Other than that it is a good book